


symmetry.

by corpsesoldier



Category: This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, Missing Scene, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-02-22 23:50:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23502394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corpsesoldier/pseuds/corpsesoldier
Summary: In order to keep Red, she could not have her now. It’s like telling her not to eat while holding honeycomb to her lips.Blue doesn't die. Time is fluid, and there are two shadows haunting the braid.
Relationships: Blue/Red (This is How You Lose the Time War)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 66





	symmetry.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sure this is an extremely niche fandom but I had Thoughts and Feelings and wrote this in one frantic sitting. Enjoy!

Blue wakes underground, far from the when and where of an apothecary on a blackened world, and the first thing she does is laugh. 

Red saved her. 

Soil fills her mouth and after the burn of poison and longing and death, it’s almost welcome. But, as ever, there is more to do. She claws herself out of the earth, drags herself inch by inch from the land of the dead, until cold air cuts her bare skin. Still half buried, the next thing she does is vomit into the churned earth. The thorns, or their memory, hurt coming up almost as much as they did going down.

Red also killed her, betrayed her. Blue forgives her in the space between breaths. Her only crime was to think a strand existed where Blue did not read her letter, did not break herself to save what she loved. 

She kneels beside her not-grave and wonders, briefly, where she is. Then she catches sight of a bloody sunset through the trees and knows she is in a forest above the Outaouais River. It makes sense; she left a deep root here, marked by time and triumph and love. The scorched sky casts red over her like an embrace and she tries to touch the light with her fingertips, only to have it splinter beneath her shadow. No matter. It would be a poor replacement.

Instead she stands on trembling fawn’s legs and makes her way down to the river to wash. 

-

She began to suspect the nature of her childhood illness not long after she found herself on a tiny, fragile rock and watched a tiny, fragile Red look up at the uncaring stars. Not long after she defied Garden and saved Red and set her on a strange and lonely path into Blue’s heart. If they could be so inextricably bound along the path of Red’s own past, who’s to say the same was not also true of her own?

And honestly, who else but Red could so thoroughly ruin her? Who else could do the impossible, could infiltrate Garden and find the taproot and trace it back to her seedling home?

As an agent of Garden, the very best, she was accustomed to the long game. She could see swirling possibilities tied to every action, threads knotted to each moment as it ticked away. She needed to plan for the many, many futures where the delicate web they had spun between them was threatened. The time—perhaps near, perhaps not—when they would be discovered, when it would come down to one of them or the other. Red has more vision than any Agency soldier Blue had ever encountered, but even she might not see it coming, or else hoped it would not. Blue breathes contingencies like oxygen and so she began to plan.

She laces her letters with information, instructions. Too dangerous to be specific. Red will have to figure much of it out on her own. Blue believes she’s up to the challenge. 

When the shape of the danger becomes clear, when she spends a hollow year growing Red’s last letter as a prologue to her own death, she works more deliberately. The entire time, she is furious. Furious with Red for asking her to stop reading, stop writing, to go back to the silence of before like she had never carved Red’s words into her bones. Furious with the Agency for tracing her path, and with herself for leaving a path that could be traced. Furious with her own weak, infected heart.

But she will not let them hurt Red. Even if it doesn’t work, if all her plans come to nothing, or if Red somehow did mean to betray her—

It doesn’t matter. She was always going to step in front of the bullet. She can only hope her armor is in place before it strikes. 

She seeds as many strands as she can with signs. She eats the poison. She writes one last, cruel letter and hopes Red can see the words within the words. Through the shattering pain she poses her body in a final desperate message, and Blue dies.

-

Blue forces herself to spend time recuperating. She wants to run, to climb the threads following the scent of blood and pomegranate juice. Wants to finally stand beside Red and see what color the light takes as it passes between them. But she’s weaker now than she’s been in a long time and the universe infinitely more dangerous. As long as she stays put, neither Garden nor the Agency will think to look for her. She will not let her hunger be what gets both of them killed.

But now it seems like hunger is all she feels. She is no longer part of Garden. The root anchoring her down through time was purged the instant Garden felt the sickness begin to unravel her. If she did not already know how it felt to be alone, she thinks it might have broken her. 

But she doesn’t break. Days pass. Instead, she grows brittle and ravenous, because what she feels in the core of her in place of Garden’s steady thrum is the frantic jump and pulse of Red flinging herself up and down the braid. Red wrote once that she could sense Blue’s footsteps anywhere in time. Empty of everything but longing, Blue feels the discordant scream of Red’s movements like pressure against her eardrums.

Something is wrong. Maybe the Agency still suspects. Maybe Red is in danger, hunted by Commandant’s monsters. She has no more time to waste here. Decision made, Blue stands and steps sideways out of time and begins to seek.

-

Red moves fast these days and Blue is stiff from undying. It takes longer to catch her than she thought it would. Blue always seems to arrive a little too late, stepping onto the scene in the aftermath of some act of heroism or brutality. Most often brutality, these days, and she doesn’t want to think about what that means. The war had stained them both with blood, but she knows Red never relished death.

She tracks her to London, of all places. Or rather, a million Londons across a thousand times. She wonders what that means, too. Wonders why she’s running herself in circles in a place Blue loves. Answers present themselves, but Blue would prefer to be certain.

She finally sees Red again, or for the first time, in a London rank and heavy with sickness. Sees her set fire to a particular building that, between the placement and the wind, will likely burn half the city to the ground. The pit in Blue’s chest yawns greedily as she watches Red glow against the flames, her face a broken expanse of shadow and light. She is so beautiful that Blue almost doesn’t notice her glassy eyes and hollow cheeks, or the way she watches the fire like she wants to curl up in it.

She doesn’t know.

Blue could scream from disappointment. She doesn’t _know._ Her brilliant, hopeful Red, the same Red who sent her a letter within a letter within a letter, didn’t see the hidden message Blue left scrawled across the tableau of her corpse. 

This is why Red’s trips through the braid reverberate with jagged, painful echoes in her ribcage. She’s running. Guilty and heartsick and spiralling. Away from one death and towards another. 

Her death was meant to protect Red, and instead it had broken her. 

It takes every ounce of her self control not to run and throw her arms around Red, to wrap her up and force the cracked edges back into a shape she recognizes. To whisper in Red’s ear that she would never leave her, that neither war nor death could keep them apart. Every ounce of control, and still she crosses half the distance before she stops herself.

It did work, somehow. She’s alive. She is alive, and so Red must still save her. And going to her now would unravel the tangled thread of causality they wove through the braid and Chaos would pour in. 

In order to keep Red, she could not have her now. It’s like telling her not to eat while holding honeycomb to her lips. But she had lived with hunger all her life, and she could take a little more, for both their sakes.

So she backs off, each step sawing at her heart, and watches until Red turns from the inferno and disappears.  
-

Blue is subtle. 

Perhaps too much so. Maybe her clues hadn’t been clear enough, loud enough to reach Red over the horror of finding her body, of believing she had killed her. 

She chases Red through a dozen disasters, watching as she plays the part of obedient soldier. Watches as she flirts with destruction only to flinch at the last moment. There are times she’s so angry she can barely breathe—this isn’t her Red. Her Red was equal to her in every way; she struck at flaws in a plan with deadly precision, read in her words every shade of meaning she intended and several she didn’t, dug her teeth into what she believed and didn’t let go. Her Red was brave and smart and stubborn. She _should_ have understood. How dare she falter, how dare she fail the test Blue had set for her?

And then Blue imagines how it would feel to hold Red’s body in her arms. To know she had forged the knife and driven it into her beloved’s heart. She thinks she might lose herself to that pain, too.

But she is very subtle and her signs are still out there, waiting for Red to find them. She decides to help. Guide her, pull the strings, be the breath of wind that spawns a storm. Better than watching Red destroy herself one strand at a time. She hopes it will be enough to shock Red back to herself. To reignite the small blue flame of hope inside her.

Being so close, but unseen, unknown, is like dying again. But slowly, this time. Drawn out over weeks. Her throat choked with words she couldn’t say, her hands weak and trembling from the desire to reach out. She tries to take comfort in the freedom to watch Red as much as she pleases. It had never been safe before, during their dance and their long correspondence, to let her eyes linger too long. She drinks in as much of Red as she can; her strong shoulders, her glittering eyes, the lovely fractal way her flesh ripples and unwinds as she prepares for a mission.

She takes it all and finds it’s not nearly enough. She has to move faster, before she consumes herself from the inside out.

An opportunity presents itself in a London at the end of its life, empty save for Red wandering in the dark beneath the weight of old stone and steel. A particular station, a particular mural. Maybe that’s all it would take. She knows Red as well as she knows herself and, carefully, she draws her to the right platform.

Red comes so close and then stops, one foot on the stairs. Her shoulders are tensed as though for a blow and Blue is terrified she’d pushed too hard. That any moment Red will see her, sense her nearby, and send the whole tower tumbling down. Blue tried to be careful, stepping in Red’s footprints as she tailed her through the braid. Tried to keep Red from the crushing gravity well of need she was sure poured out of her. If they failed here, at the end, it would be no one’s fault but her own greedy self.

The smart move would be to run. Get some distance. Try again elsewhere. She can feel the braid humming under this world’s skin and it would be nothing to reach for it. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t take her eyes from Red, both of them shaking, balanced on a knife’s edge of cause and effect. Blue is so very tired of playing games.

Red doesn’t see her. Instead her eyes find the mural and the look of grief and fear that crosses her face tests Blue’s self control once again. But it’s working, it’s _working._ She can see it, can even hear it as the implants beneath Red’s skin whir to life. Like the sight had jumpstarted her heart. She isn’t running anymore. She’s planning.

Red reaches up to touch the dangling, painted hand and steps out of the strand. 

Blue stumbles to the space she left. Breathes in the scent of her. Presses her palm flat to the wall where Red’s fingers brushed it.

And then she slides down to the ground and sobs in relief.

-

It goes quickly then. 

Red’s solution is difficult and recursive and elegantly simple. They become echoes of themselves—Blue shadows the shadow that haunted them across time, gathering fragments of their love to recreate something lost.

It’s strange, to see them like this. Their younger selves wary and full of bravado, hurling beautifully crafted taunts back and forth until something sticks, begins to change them. She wonders if she can spot the moment she loses her heart. When she tears the throat from Garden’s monster? As she sips at a letter in a tea shop? Earlier still? Maybe it was never truly hers to begin with.

And she watches Red, too, in places imagined but never seen. She keeps trying to dull the pain of her want by observing, taking whatever she can get, but each visit grinds it sharp enough to cut her. She sees Red exultant and triumphant, sees her hungry, sees her distraught. She sees her weep in an ancient swamp before giving in to the temptation of Blue’s words and she wonders if she should leave Red her privacy. But Red will have to devour all of Blue before this is done; it’s only fair she should have her fill as well.

She watches her read that final letter as the world ends. Watches her scream and curse and tear at the earth and it rips a hole in her own heart. If she could go back and blunt that letter’s edges. If she could spare her this pain, she would. She never wanted to hurt her. 

But, for people like them, what’s done is done. And it’s almost over.

Watching Red writhe out of discarded skin, watching her own face take the place of one she loves so well, makes Blue’s teeth ache with the wrongness of it. But this is the price they must pay. Red has been a part of Blue since before she was anyone at all, and now Blue will live inside Red the same way. There’s a symmetry to their strange lives. That has to mean something.

Red has to do the next part alone. Blue wants to be with her every step of the way, but if she dives into Garden beside her, neither of them will ever make it out. It burns her not to know what’s happening. She only hopes they’ve done enough.

It’s only after Red plummets downthread that Blue lets herself consider the possibility she’ll never see her again. She feels hollow under her skin, and the thought howls through the cavernous space like hurricane winds. Red must succeed, because otherwise Blue would be well and truly dead. But after she taints Garden’s perfect little soldier, there will be no more hiding.

There’s every likelihood that Garden will rip Red to pieces and use her to fertilize new agents for the ever-spinning war machine. And if that happens, it will be Blue who led her to her death. Who forged the blade. Shadows, echoes, recursion and symmetry. It’s almost enough to make her laugh.

What Blue wouldn’t give just for the chance to touch her.

An instant and an eternity later, she feels Red—her brave, incredible, _perfect_ Red—surge back upthread so fast it nearly knocks Blue over. She arcs past her jumping off point, screaming into the past to escape whatever monsters pursued her out of Garden. Blue wants to reach out into the braid and catch her in her arms, but she’s already gone. 

Heart racing, hands shaking, Blue dives into Red’s wake and lets it carry her. They had _done_ it. Somehow in spite of everything they had done it. They’re alive. They’re free.

By the time Blue arrives in that sun-baked desert, the Commandant is already there.

-

It takes longer than she likes to admit for her to infiltrate the prison. Red dove into the deepest depths of Garden for her, but she’d had a Blue-shaped suit of armor to protect her. If she tried to get that deep in Red’s Shift without some protection, she’d be discovered at once, destroyed or reprogrammed or melted down into fuel. And Red would be alone, never knowing she had succeeded.

Or worse, thinking Blue chose not to come back for her.

Blue seeds a careless agent in a border strand—asymptomatic, they would never know—and rides them downthread. She passes her consciousness from hand to hand until she reaches a likely puppet, grows a tender shoot within them, twines it around their mind. It isn’t as neat as she would like, but time is short. It would serve.

The guard she stole has access to the prison’s layout, the shift rotations, the alarm codes. Has access to Red. The first time Blue sees her there, she nearly broke cover at the sight. Red’s too thin, parts of her sunken where they’d torn machinery out of her. She’s bruised and burned and exhausted. And under it all, her defiant smile pulls taut like razor wire, daring Commandant to cut herself on her teeth.

Blue steals a moment to write a letter, the pen clumsy at first in unfamiliar fingers. But eventually the words come easily. She doesn’t have space to say all she had wished to say since her death. Chooses instead to say the most important parts: _I’m sorry_ and _I’m here_ and _I love you._

She trades shifts with another guard to contrive a moment alone with their prisoner. She wraps a heavy hand around Red’s arm and her heart stutters at the contact. Blue doesn’t want to _wait_ anymore. She’s waited so long, been so good, so patient. She’s here, touching Red, and she is starving. 

In her weakness, she draws the moment out. 

“Why are you doing this?” she asks. 

Red turns to her with shadowed eyes. She doesn’t recognize her, and for a brief, unfair moment, Blue is hurt.

“Some things matter more than winning,” Red says.

Blue’s heart splits open. She doesn’t trust herself to linger. She throws Red into the cell like any other guard, slides the letter after her, closes the door. Red, even diminished, can handle the rest.

The guard won’t remember much. Blue slips out of their skin and back into her own, and waits.

-

A woman steps out of the flow of time and onto the bank of the Ohio River. Her eyes dart, her muscles bunch in preparation to flee, but there is hope carved plain upon her face. 

She sees the other woman resting beneath a tree, watching the geese on the water. She doesn’t look exactly as she remembers, but it’s her. It really is her. 

Red’s expression fractures. She takes a single halting step.

The sound is like a live wire pressed to Blue’s spine. She surges to her feet, closes the distance between them before Red can think of what to say. She takes a shuddering breath and just manages,

“Blue.”

Blue smiles. She reaches out to touch Red’s hands, her neck, her cheek.

“My Red,” she says. “My heart.”

She kisses Red. 

And the gaping, empty place inside her fills, and is silent.


End file.
